Is Obama’s Pain Our Pain?

Obama says, “my story is your story.” We believed Bill Clinton could “feel” our “pain.” But Obama, predicted here to run his general election campaign as a Son of Kansas, really has to sweat to jam his book-length (Dreams of my Father) resumè into a Middle American pigeon hole. Obama is brilliant, successful, talented and hardly an average American. His dreams are to rebalance America toward leadership by the meritocracy that ran the nation out of Washington from 1933 to the mid-1960s. The very elite Middle America mistrusts.

I like the way Edward Luttwak, the noted military historian, talks about the problems facing America today:

the immense wealth of the US—a country of 19,000 local airports and a Mediterranean's worth of private pools—is being eroded by seemingly insurmountable political inhibitions against pragmatic remedies for key problems, from illegal drugs to mass transport, to healthcare. (The latter—including the monstrous Medicare programme that pays for quintuple bypasses for 97 year olds at a total cost that will soon exceed the Pentagon's entire budget—now consumes 16 per cent of the US economy).

Towering above even Luttwak’s difficulties—a public education system run to benefit its employees, not its customers.